Tagged: world

Alan Collins, University of Adelaide and Andrew Merdith, University of Sydney Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, with life first appearing around 3 billion years ago. To unravel this incredible history, scientists use a range of different techniques to determine when and where continents moved, how life evolved, how climate changed … Read More

Last week I promised to write a blog post detailing how I created this public transport animation. On reflection, it’s a topic best dealt with over a few sessions. Let’s start simple. How might you plot lots of geographic data on a map? In this post I will show you how to programmatically create a map of the World’s … Read More

This video was made very quickly and could use some work. I post it here in case you find it interesting. I suggest you watch it full-screen, in high definition with scaling off. [vimeo width=”680″ height=”383″]http://vimeo.com/20966740[/vimeo] The animation depicts two and half months of 2011 USGS earthquake data. Blue circles represent deep seismic activity recordings (>= 40km deep). Read More

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a … Read More

Tim Parke, the Clinical Director of Auckland Hospital Emergency Department, has written an opinion piece in today’s Herald, extolling the virtues of state health care. “Universal” health care, as he calls it. That word immediately alerts me to the socialist thinking that will be behind the article. The most obvious aspect of state health is [...] Related posts: … Read More

Unfortunately, I have been too busy to comment on Obama’s “historic” healthcare bill, up until now. Somehow, congratulating Obama on his first real achievement seems somewhat hypocritical, considering I think the bill is the usual socialist mix of paternalistic pseudo-concern and a distressing disregard of both taxpayer’s pockets and obvious consequences. The fight to reverse [...] Related posts: … Read More

Two US surgeons have offered some commentary onÂ Why US Healthcare Costs Are Out of Control. It is a highly revealing read. They cite six reasons: The Building of Shrines for Hospital Administrators – buildings constructed out of desire to make a mark rather than out of necessity. Unnecessary Duplication of Services – Often added under the aegis [...] Related posts: … Read More

It looks like the Democrats are going to attempt to shoehorn the Obamacare bill through on the thinnest of margins. Considering the controversial nature of some parts of the bill and the partisan sentiment it has generated, one can only say that this is a foolish and dangerous thing to try and do. Time has [...] Related posts: … Read More

You Â may be wondering why Republicans seem so adamantly against Obama’s healthcare bill when it seems, superficially at any rate, to offer millions more people a chance of decent health care. The Democrats love to portray the Republicans as selfish people obstructing the provision of healthcare to millions of their fellow Americans. This may explain their [...] Related posts: … Read More

The House of Representatives has just approved Obama’s healthcare bill 220 -215. The bill will now go to the Senate where the Democrats may have the numbers to pass the bill – assuming all Democrats and the two independents vote for it. Obama needs to get everything passed before the mid-term elections. It is highly [...] Related posts: … Read More

Sciblogs Archive

Sciblogs is the biggest blog network of scientists in New Zealand, an online forum for discussion of everything from clinical health to climate change. Our Scibloggers are either practising scientists or have been writing on science-related issues for some time. They welcome your feedback!

Sciblogs was created by the Science Media Centre and is independently funded